CoL49 (5) Anarchist Miracles

[Robin Landseadel]

Once Oedipa breaks free from the Greek Way she hurtles into a  
landscape full of the symbols of the Trystero. She finds it inscribed  
on the sidewalk in chalk, played by little girls as they skip rope  
late at night. This little section follows the logic of dreams,  
reflected in:

	"Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into
	real and dreamed."
	PC 95

Oedipa seems to respond to the experience as a religious revelation, a  
gnostic experience:

	"The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as
	well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from
	her memory. She was meant to remember.	
	PC 95

Other clues proliferate as to the miraculous nature of this system  
that Oedipa is exploring. The Trystero/W.A.S.T.E. theme seems to be  
emerging from the fairy tale/old rhyming games we find in children's  
play:

		Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three,
		Turning taxi from across the sea ...

	"Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way.
	Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to
	retaliate, stopped believing in them.
	PC 96

Coincidences pile up and culminate with Oedipa running into an old  
acquaintance from her days with Pierce, Jesus Arrabal. Arrabal sees  
Pierce as an archetype, perhaps The Archetype, of everything that is  
wrong about Capitalism.

	"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But
	another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we
	coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.
	Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another
	world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and
	leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the
	masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body
	itself. And yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that
	perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle.
	Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we
	fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage,
	redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend,
	unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to
	an Indian."
	PC 97

Jbor [among others] noticed that Jesus Arrabal points to Fernando  
Arrabal:

	JBOR:
	Just noticed, by the way, that the term théâtre panique was
	invented in 1962 by Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish-born
	playwright (in the Artaud/Beckett mould), film director, actor and
	chess aficionado, who writes in French. He is very much a
	contemporary of TRP's, his work shows the influence of
	surrealism and magic realism, and in 1959 he visited the U.S. to
	receive a Ford Foundation award. In his plays he "sought to
	create a kind of ritualistic drama which combines elements of
	tragedy and buffoonery with religious (or quasi-religious) 	
	ceremonial. It is intended to surprise and frighten as well as to
	arouse laughter."

	http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0804818.html

	That name certainly rings a bell (or, at least, stirs
	 a clear soup with a chicken foot).

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50737&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

http://tinyurl.com/2z2nms

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0807&msg=128066&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

	Something to note about that passage in "The Crying of Lot 49":
	 I probably never noticed this before—having read "The
	 Automobile Graveyard" for the first time this year—this scene in
	49—

		 . . . .or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked
		 Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole
		 in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of
		 telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and
		 secular miracle of communication. . . .

	 Sounds much like:

		The play takes place in front of an automobile graveyard. In
		the background, the carcasses of automobiles piled on top
		of each other. The automobles are all old, dirty and rusty.
		Those in the first row have burlap curtains instead of glass
		in the windows.
		Fernando Arrabal: "The Automobile Graveyard", page 9

	The characters in "The Automobile Graveyard" for the most part
	live in these junked cars, some are even lower—begging to get
	into one of these wrecks. This is the side of the tracks Oedipa
	never really was aware of before. Lew moving into acceptance
	of his preterite status might be the curtain-raiser for the actual
	final resolution of the novel's traditional "plot" with the final
	downfall of Deuce. And then into the unknown future and the
	novel's coda.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0807&msg=128066&keywords=fernando%20arrabal

This all strikes me as central to the workings of The Crying of Lot  
49. Theater of Cruelty is such an important element of this work, but  
it is usually overlooked in favor of pursuing the clues placed in  
front of Oedipa. If you look long enough [perhaps looking using the  
same techniques involved in looking at a "magic eye" picture] you will  
see the clue-producing machine. Like Richard Poirer points out in  
"Embattled Underground" his review in the May 1, 1966 New York Times:

	. . . What is also noticeable here, and throughout the novel, is
	that the major character is really Pynchon himself, Pynchon's
	voice with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic
	catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through
	the massed wreckage of his civilization, "a salad of despair."
	That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero,
	is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But
	then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And
	that is what this novel is.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html

It's all a bit like "Duck Amuck" if you think of it.

This is nearly a side note, but it's hard to imagine an Anarchist  
Miracle more intense than LSD. The substance found its way into  
America via the CIA, looking for more dangerous and interesting  
"Mickeys" to slip to the unsuspected. Instead, we either got the  
revolution of consciousness that led to the ecological conception of  
Gaia, or yet another tool of social control—the best excuse for a "war  
on drugs" that anyone's come up with so far:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3jru_antilsd-propiganda_fun